Treme: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray review

What’s so sensational about Treme is how unsensational the show is. This is storytelling that shies away from phoniness, yet it’s unveiled via a medium that’s all about pretense. Now, that isn’t to bag on the rest of television, but you just have to tip your hat to Treme, which seemingly goes out of its way to break the established rules so it can do its own thing.

Season Two, which kicks off 14 months after the storm, sees the show heading into darker territory, with sporadic acts of violence erupting throughout the city of New Orleans. Meanwhile, the myriad residents that we came to know through their struggles in the first season are trying to move forward and get their lives back to places of normalcy, as the city itself enters the post-Katrina recovery stage. There will be food, there will be dancing, there will be misfortune, and there will be bliss, but most of all, there will be music.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Treme: The Big Uneasy

Nobody can accuse HBO of not doing its part to shed light on the plight of New Orleans. They got behind Spike Lee and his mammoth documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and have since financed a follow-up doc from Lee entitled If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise. The former painstakingly covered the days and months in New Orleans after Katrina, while the latter traced the rebuilding of the city, the Saints winning the Superbowl, and the BP oil spill. Now, for most networks, this would have been enough. Some suit, when pitched the idea of an Orleans-based TV series, would've said, "We already devoted hours on the subject to Spike Lee. We did our part." Thankfully, HBO isn't that kind of network. If it were, we wouldn't have the chance to bask in David Simon's and Eric Overmyer's post-Katrina slice-of-life series, Treme.

Treme just kicked off its second season on HBO, and being HBO, there are still opportunities to catch the first episode, "Accentuate the Positive," in case you missed it. The show has now moved its characters fourteen months away from the storm that devastated their city, and instead of things looking up, it sees the storyline going into darker areas than it dared to in its freshman year. Dave Walker, TV critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, has lived in the city since 2000, so he not only knows a thing or two about Treme, but also what life's been like for residents since Katrina, and how the increasing level of violence in the second season isn't a TV gimmick, but a true case of art imitating life. Bullz-Eye spoke at length to Walker, who's got a great deal to say about the show's new season. "It's dark because those were very dark days in the city."

"The headlines got pretty grim in the time that they're depicting," Walker continues. "The recovery just seemed to be dragging. Violent crime had returned to the city, after basically being non-existent for a long time. In a perverse way, it may be better television, because it has events and activity that people are more used to seeing in television drama. We didn't exactly hail those elements as something that would improve narrative inertia at the time we were living through them, but I think for people who are just trying to watch TV, it may be stickier, it may be more compelling, because it's got stuff they see in other shows. I don't know. It's a weird show to handicap for viewers who are watching outside of New Orleans."

Lucia Micarelli, who plays up and coming violinist Annie Tee, talks of the sometimes unsettling nature of the manner in which the show is put together. "Annie's not so far away from me. So much that it's creepy. I was talking to Steve Earle a couple weeks ago, and he was saying how the show is so much art imitates life imitates art. It's really strange." She continues on, almost aghast, with a reminiscence revolving around a scene from an upcoming episode – one which is rooted in a real life tragedy. "A couple months ago we were shooting the funeral of a young musician who had been shot. And they got his actual family to be in that scene, and recreate the funeral, and say their eulogies. I remember when I found that out, I was like 'This is fucked up!'" Her personal feelings aside, Micarelli recalls the sequence as being almost cathartic for the family members involved.

Read the rest of this article by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Treme: The Complete First Season

Let’s talk about not only the most important TV series you’re not watching, but also the most entertaining and rewarding. It’s called Treme, (pronounced Truh-MAY) and its first season aired on HBO last year, but hardly anybody tuned in, including, it must be admitted, the writer of this piece. Well, I did watch the first three episodes, and while I liked the idea of Treme, something about it didn’t quite grab me enough to keep me tuning in. Once I was blind and now I can see.

Treme, from David Simon and Eric Overmyer (who previously worked with Simon on The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street), deals with the city of New Orleans three months after Katrina. It’s about how various citizens attempt, against the odds, to reclaim their home and start again. If that sounds at all dreary, let me tell you, it most certainly is not. Here’s a series that’s filled with equal amounts of joy and heartbreak. A character may experience a profound sense of despair, only to turn around and learn how to live again. The aftermath of the hurricane and the subsequent flooding of the city is merely a backdrop to draw rich, layered characters that quickly begin to feel like neighbors you know and love.

In many ways it reminds me of the rich tapestry Armistead Maupin accomplished with his Tales of the City series back in the 70s and 80s, only that was through prose (although eventually miniseries were made from his first three books). Maupin’s Tales have become integral reading for those who live in San Francisco, and in time the denizens of New Orleans will feel the same about Treme, assuming they don’t already.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.